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Have We Got a Review for You

People in business are clueless about selling, and snobbish too. They view it as a grubby activity, though it is vital to revenue.

By

L. Gordon Crovitz

Updated April 26, 2012 8:13 p.m. ET

Modern economies are built by people agreeing to buy and sell for mutual benefit, but there is near-universal disdain for the sales process itself—including the people doing the selling. There is Arthur Miller's pitiful Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman," the most studied play in American schools, and the real-estate agents of David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross," who, in the words of Philip Delves Boughton, are "victimized, duplicitous, and desperate, Marx's capitalist nightmare made real."